RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/falling_pennies_and_pandemic_declarations.html

Something is fishy about the COVID numbers…on a foundational level.

Regarding deaths of American citizens in 2020, the departure from the truth about them is fundamentally in the concealing, counting, and recording of numbers.  What we’ve seen in the numbers reporting this year is subject to a timeless trick of deceptive reasoning with statistics and control.

The trick, performed by, let’s say, Tricky Tester, first names as “novel” something that almost no one has heard of.  Its actual oldness or novelness does not matter.  Only the position of being able to control the testing and reporting matters.

Tricky Tester, being in control of the means of testing, conveniently allows no anonymous testing to be added to the reporting.  It would be logistically almost impossible to count anonymous tests, anyway.  Therefore, only those who wish to be known by and associated with the institutions doing the testing will then self-select for being tested for it.  Without anonymous self-tests, there are no results from people who don’t want to be associated with the testing facilities or suffer the possible consequences of doing so (like the well advertised threat of involuntary medical quarantine and isolation, notwithstanding whether the result is accurate or false).  The plausible ubiquity of the molecular strand being tested for, then, can never be known.

So beyond scientifically controversial, if not meaningless, testing such as PCR, beyond the debate over comorbidities, and beyond other scientific chips in the narrative’s armor — meaning no disrespect to hardworking professional microbiologists here — what invalidates the claim of a new virus being causal to 210,000 deaths is the framing of the untenable argument itself.  For unspoken in the argument’s premise is the fact that one doing testing wilI find microorganisms, strands of DNA, and what people call viruses in dying and dead people, and in all people.  It is a given. 

The sly Tricky Tester can pick one molecular strand as “the cause.”  Once selected as “the one,” it will be found in cases of morbidity because it exists in people.  The presence in human beings of such molecular strands, which will inevitably be detected, is called the human microbiome, and the human virome in particular, which are well-documented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/an-alternative-to-lockdowns-declaration-offers-trump-a-chance-to-lead-on-science/

It’s baseless to assume that the benefit of lockdowns outweighs their harm.

O n October 4, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya gathered at Great Barrington, Mass., to pen a declaration that, in just five days, has gained some 15,000 signatures from doctors and health scientists. The declaration calls for a smart alternative to the lockdowns and social-distancing rules that Joe Biden insists are based on “the science.”

Other experts have been quick to offer criticisms, of course. But that’s how science works. It rarely speaks with one voice. And this is why the declaration matters: It snatches the science card from Biden and everyone else who claims the science should dissuade us from returning to normal life.

Trump now has the chance to take the science card himself — legitimately. He doesn’t need to pretend all scientists agree, or appeal to his own impressive recovery from COVID-19. Instead, he should remind everyone of the true cost of shutting down schools and businesses and churches.

Barrington reminds us that the burden of proof was always on those who called for Draconian lockdowns. That’s because of the severe costs of these measures. As their declaration notes, the “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” These include cancers that go undetected because of reduced screening, worse outcomes from cardiovascular disease, deteriorating mental health, and increased harm to at-risk children. All of these risks are especially acute for the young and the less affluent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/no-durham-report-or-indictments-before-election-day/

The Justice Department’s decision does not mean there will be no more “Russiagate” disclosures.

A xios is reporting that Attorney General Bill Barr has informed the White House and top Republicans that there will be no report or indictments filed by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham prior to the November 3 election. Durham, of course, is the prosecutor Barr assigned to investigate the genesis of the Trump–Russia probe launched during the 2016 campaign by the Obama administration.

The lack of imminent charges or a pre-election narrative report is not surprising to anyone who has watched this saga. The attorney general’s reported decision to alert government officials about it is not surprising in light of President Trump’s recent Twitter barrage, railing about the lack of arrests and prosecutions despite what he describes as “THIS TREASONOUS PLOT.” Indeed, as Axios elaborates, the president, in a Fox Business interview yesterday, complained that he believes Barr has “got all the information he needs” to file charges, yet insists on getting “more, more, more.” The president added that he doesn’t believe more is needed. “To be honest,” Trump huffed, “Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country, or he’s going to go down as, you now, a very sad situation.”

For what it’s worth, at the risk of belaboring an argument I’ve long made (most recently in a column at The Hill yesterday), many things that are in the nature of abuse-of-power simply are not violations of the criminal code. That worked to the president’s advantage during the Ukraine kerfuffle, as Democrats struggled in vain to turn his pressure on an ally for domestic political advantage into a crime. But it also applies to abuse of the executive branch’s investigative discretion. Trump’s own invocation of “treason,” which quite obviously does not apply, illustrates the difficulty of finding a penal code provision that fits the abuses of power at issue. Executive officials have vast discretion in opening investigations, especially when a foreign power is involved. It is very easy to spot overreach; it’s very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the overreach was criminal corruption.

“Past vaccines have taken a decade or longer to develop, and more than half over the past 20 years have failed during clinical trials. But four vaccine candidates have entered the last phase of clinical trials before approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Technological breakthroughs that were already in progress got a boost from a bureaucratic one in May, when the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed.” The initiative organized government agencies and private companies around the goal of developing, manufacturing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses with initial doses available by early 2021.

Leading the operation is Moncef Slaoui, a Moroccan-born Belgian-American scientist who shepherded vaccine development at the U.K. drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline from 1988 to 2017. His interest in immunology and vaccine development is personal: When he was growing up in Casablanca, his younger sister died of whooping cough. He earned a doctorate in molecular biology and immunology at the Free University of Brussels, then immigrated to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at Harvard and Tufts medical schools.

In 1988 he landed a job in GSK’s vaccine division. There he helped develop one of the world’s thickest vaccine portfolios, including inoculations for meningitis, human papillomavirus and rotavirus. The company developed 14 successful vaccines during Mr. Slaoui’s tenure. When the Trump administration tapped him to run Operation Warp Speed, liberals predictably criticized him because he came out of private industry.